<p>Glad you asked If you or anybody else can legislate that any school that publishes pre-med acceptance rate, should also publish the following, skeptics like me would shut up:</p>
<p>1) Yearly acceptance percentage grid of MCAT and GPAs on the lines of the AAMC grid.
2) Criteria for the pre-health committee to provide the committee letter.
3) For extra credit, the number kids from a given class expressed an interest in medicine at some point, the number first-time applicants as juniors, as seniors and as alumni.
3) For extra extra credit they should conduct a survey as to the reasons why alumni took gap years and publish the results. They can make taking the survey, a pre-condition for alumni to get a committee letter.</p>
<p>Do you think the schools that tout acceptance rates would ever make this data available? Do you think they donât have that data? </p>
<p>Just today, my second son got propaganda from Amherst touting a 97% medical school acceptance - 97% of what?</p>
<p>Duke used to publish #1 publicly, but they stopped publishing these reports â they were called âHPAC Annual Reportsâ â once my advisor stepped down⊠They provided committee letters to all applicants (as is the case at almost every elite private), so that was #2. And the Dean annually gave an interview to our newspaper in which she discussed #3.1 based on those students who opted to declare as incoming freshmen (which was optional). </p>
<p>Stanford and Penn used to provide #1 as well, but only internally; they might still. I think Iâve seen a similar grid for MIT. None of the three screens, so that takes care of #2. Again, âscreeningâ is an extraordinarily rare phenomenon.</p>
<p>I donât know of any schools that conduct a survey along the lines of your 3.2. Do bear in mind that the national average age for an incoming student is 23 or 24 (and it used to be higher). So itâs hardly something that needs to be justified or explained.</p>
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<p>LACs have very good reputations and tend to be populated by very saavy applicants. I wouldnât at all be surprised if Amherstâs 97% turned out to be reasonably calculated.</p>
<p>Sorry, this quote didnât register the first time I read it. Otherwise, I would have included this in my previous post.</p>
<p>So, you and I have been having this back and forth while the difference between your position and my position has just been WUStL? Letâs just say you like WUStL early assurance program and I donât. Thatâs quite alright.</p>
<p>I was asking the schools to publish that - not an explanation from you. Why donât they show the same zeal in transparency as they do in publishing acceptance rates?</p>
<p>
As I mentioned already, some of us are a bit more skeptical of these stats in the absence of corroborating data.</p>
<p>
I also said that no school does it⊠But, they should or else stop touting their acceptance rates.</p>
<p>One of the points you and I sparred on was the reasons why kids at these ultra competitive schools take gap years. I fail to understand how that question is inconsistent with the average age of 23-24, you keep quoting. Any rational person with a great GPA and MCAT by the end of junior year would apply. Therefore, there must be something about their application that they wanted to improve in the gap year(s). My hypothesis is that, at the grade deflated schools, the primary reason for that is just that - rank grade deflation.</p>
<p>No, I donât âlikeâ any of them, for the same reason as always: I think they capitalize on students being unreasonably afraid of applying to medical school.</p>
<p>But those three donât bother me as much as many others. Besides, I certainly donât think WUSTLâs should be treated differently from the others.</p>
<p>I was explaining that my school DID publish that (and I donât know why they stopped). I know several others that publish it internally. In my experience, schools arenât all that âzealousâ about publishing acceptance rates at all, either. Stanfordâs was only passed around internally, for example, and the University of Chicago steadfastly refused to disclose it to me.</p>
<p>I donât know much about LACs. Maybe theyâre a little more aggressive about it.</p>
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<p>There are times Iâm very skeptical. But I have a Bayesian outlook on such things. When the data contradict my prior knowledge, Iâm skeptical; when theyâre consistent with things that I know from other experiences, Iâm less skeptical.</p>
<p>But 97% at Amherst makes perfect sense to me.</p>
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<p>Addendum: Obviously this means that the statistic is not very useful, because it is easy to calculate in unreasonable ways and therefore I tend to interpret it in light of the other things I know about the school. But I donât think itâs ALWAYS unreasonably calculated, and my suspicion is that Amherstâs âtrueâ percentage probably is in the high 90s.</p>
<p>Curmudgeon raised a good point, being in Yale with D. âGreener Pasturesâ and âOpen Doorsâ are always the selling points by these elite schools. My follow-up question would be, does it potentially âClose Doorsâ to the kids who would go there only for the âenriching experienceâ, then on their way to med schools afterwards, could they underestimate their competition in pre-med grades (glowing acceptance might inflate ego a bit)?</p>
<p>Yale definitely help you get into finance, consulting, maybe law (being in one of these professions, I donât promote any of them). Stats of 60 seniors made it to med school suggests to me you didnât get a leg up in attending that school, considering how much resource Yale has, to shower their pre-meds with EC opportunity, research project, volunteering at their own med school, etc.</p>
<p>Bear in mind that (1) many Yale students PREFER other options to medical school â not fake preferences, not pretend preferences, but actual true preferences; and (2) I donât know why everybody is obsessed with the number of seniors who get in. Remember, the national average age of an incoming MS1 is 23 or 24. Gap years are not a failure. Many students take them as a break to help prevent burnout, or because they want one last hurrah at doing something interesting with their lives.</p>
<p>The stuff you put in quotes made me chuckle:) To your point - kids do get caught up in the name brands and the bragging rights with their classmates. My son definitely did. He got full tuition at Rutgers and Tulane, and probably would have gotten quite a bit of merit aid from Emory. But, he wanted that âexciting experienceâ, as you put it. Once my wife sided with him, it was game over for me </p>
<p>By godâs grace, I was lucky enough to be able to pay for it. More importantly he survived that meat grinder of a school and has come through pretty well. It wasnât easy by any stretch of imagination, as some folks tend to project. When he saw the class averages for his first tests in Calculus II and Calculus based Physics II in his first semester, he couldnât believe them. In some of my sonâs classes the class averages on tests were 50-60%. For kids who never scored anything less than 95-100 in high schools, thatâs quite a shock. Quite a few kids never come out of that shock of the new reality and simply regress. By the time they are done with the Organic Chemistry, the pre-med dreams of quite a few kids are gone. </p>
<p>And even the ones that make it through some how, have to cross another hurdle called the pre-health committee. Some of these committees (especially, at the small LACs) seem to act as if they are more interested in preserving their acceptance rates so that they can tout that in the next recruiting cycle.</p>
<p>For the successful students, its a wonder how anybody else finds it hard:) They canât believe that there are people like me even talking up things like early acceptance programs and stuff.</p>
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It matters, because, most rational people who wanted to become doctors and had good grades and MCAT scores by the end of their junior years, are unlikely to decide not to apply. Therefore there must be something they wanted to improve with their application - it could be the GPA that took a beating, the MCAT test that they werenât ready to take or the ECs that they couldnât fit in while struggling to take care of the first two.</p>
<p>The total number each year is around 150 or more at Yale. The fact that they donât apply as seniors means absolutely nothing more than they are not ready or they just donât want bother attending any school that might admit them. So they are padding their resume to be competitive during the gap year.</p>
<p>^ We had an young lady give us a tour 3 years ago at Yale who was moving on to MD/PhD at Columbia. She spent her first year determined to be a MechE, changed focus next year, was graduating with an MS three years later in one of those complex multi-science subject acronym major. Not everyone is as focused coming into undergrad but someone who had already applied and gotten into a med school usually is. They in fact may have some of the research/volunteering/shadowing aspects on their resume carried over from high school.</p>
<p>Lots of real numbers in there. Given how expensive med school is, the dearth of scholarships, the above-market interest rates (slated to go back up to 6.8% on Juy 1 unless Congress does something), itâs an imperative to minimize undergraduate debt. âUnless you can rely on parents or a trust fund to pay for all your schooling.</p>
<p>braincollege - Is Yale giving you no financial aid? If so, since WashU is giving you 1/2 tuition, then WashU is the clear choice. Itâs not like youâre giving up much of anything other than a Northeast location and Ivy cachet. WashU is a premier place for premed and has one of the best med schools in the US.</p>
<p>I know several students who took gap years because they âneeded themâ; I know several who took gap years because they could have gotten into medical school but wanted to strengthen their application further.</p>
<p>I also know plenty of folks who could have applied at the end of junior year and wished not to â burnout, wanting a break, etc. </p>
<p>But letâs even say that everybodyâs in the first two groups. Is that a failure? What on earth is so wrong with a gap year anyway? Itâs standard operating procedure in business school applications, for example, and nobody complains about that. (Well, except on this forum, actually. They get so many complaints about it that the business school thread has a sticky on the subject.)</p>
<p>Again, I canât stress enough that the national AVERAGE is that incoming students are 23 or 24. This is how medical school is.</p>
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<p>Apologies, but after reading it a couple of times I donât understand post #72.</p>
<p>My MS1 daughter was randomly placed in graduate housing with 3 other MS1âs, and she was the only one of the 4 that was coming straight from UG, the other 3 ranging from 1-4 years out.</p>
<p>I wonder if some of the difficulty weâre having is in the use of the word âhard.â Things can be âhardâ for several reasons: they can be low probability, they can be labor-intensive, and they can require talent.</p>
<p>My argument is that for the sorts of students who tend to be offered BS/MDs, premed will not be low-probability. Of course premed will still be labor-intensive (though not always as much as advertised) and will still require talent (which they have).</p>
<p>bluedevil, here is your quote âmany Yale students PREFER other options to medical school â not fake preferences, not pretend preferences, but actual true preferencesâ, post #72 repeats, please spell out your other âoptionsâ to OP to see if these are his âactual true preferenceâ of attending Yale, if not, you are not helping him make a decision, even if your above assumption can be valid. By the way, are there that many Yale entering pre-meds have âother true preferencesâ, do you have knowledge of that? If so, this argues for attending that school, competition would decline quickly if your statement is correct. Somehow, I thought put on pre-med as intended study will slightly lower your chance admission, most school seek diversity of student interests.</p>
If you or anybody else can legislate that any school that publishes pre-med acceptance rate, should also publish the following, skeptics like me would shut up:</p>